Many people have been misled by LLMs into believing they have an important breakthrough when they don't. If you think you have a breakthrough, please try the reality checks in this post (the first is fast and easy). If you're wrong, now is the best time to figure that out.
Yeah, that's it exactly. For me there's a power and an ease of flow that comes from having the REPL in the context of your running software, with access to program state and the easy ability to modify your code as it runs without having to restart anything or lose state, that's really unbeatable.
So far: complex data visualization, transportation logistics, voting-related nonprofit, medical research, and augmented analytics. I like to explore new domains :)
> It's just incredible what a surplus value this dude alone provides to the ecosystem)
Seconded; it's pretty jaw-dropping!
> The tight feedback loop you have while molding a running program in your editor and the constant dopamine drip feed it causes are just too addictive.
Well-said -- I've been needing to write some Python recently, and it's only redoubled my preference for Clojure; the Python shell is a poor substitute at best for the Clojure REPL :(
I can say that I (like many others) have built a thriving career on Clojure. I like to change jobs every couple of years, and I've never yet had any trouble finding a Clojure job I'm excited about (and I only consider well-paid remote jobs with friendly teams with companies doing something I feel good about). The community is mostly active on the Clojurians slack (currently ~24,000 users) and clojureverse.org.
So -- it's a niche for sure, but a very successful niche, and one that many people are very happy in. There aren't a ton of jobs out there relative to, say, Python, but there are also fewer people competing for those jobs, so it works out fine for individuals. It can be tricky to find your first Clojure job, but I think that's true in most languages.
I plan to stick with it for the foreseeable future, because there's no other language that I like nearly as much, or can be nearly as productive in.